ble, especially here where the old man sits in his old
arm-chair; but on Thanksgiving-night the blaze should dance higher up
the chimney and send a shower of sparks into the outer darkness. Toss
on an armful of those dry oak chips, the last relicts of the Mermaid's
knee-timbers--the bones of your namesake, Susan. Higher yet, and
clearer, be the blaze, till our cottage windows glow the ruddiest in
the village and the light of our household mirth flash far across the
bay to Nahant.

And now come, Susan; come, my children. Draw your chairs round me, all
of you. There is a dimness over your figures. You sit quivering
indistinctly with each motion of the blaze, which eddies about you
like a flood; so that you all have the look of visions or people that
dwell only in the firelight, and will vanish from existence as
completely as your own shadows when the flame shall sink among the
embers.

Hark! let me listen for the swell of the surf; it should be audible a
mile inland on a night like this. Yes; there I catch the sound, but
only an uncertain murmur, as if a good way down over the beach, though
by the almanac it is high tide at eight o'clock, and the billows must
now be dashing within thirty yards of our door. Ah! the old man's ears
are failing him, and so is his eyesight, and perhaps his mind, else
you would not all be so shadowy in the blaze of his Thanksgiving fire.

How strangely the past is peeping over the shoulders of the present!
To judge by my recollections, it is but a few moments since I sat in
another room. Yonder model of a vessel was not there, nor the old
chest of drawers, nor Susan's profile and mine in that gilt
frame--nothing, in short, except this same fire, which glimmered on
books, papers and a picture, and half discovered my solitary figure in
a looking-glass. But it was paler than my rugged old self, and
younger, too, by almost half a century.

Speak to me, Susan; speak, my beloved ones; for the scene is
glimmering on my sight again, and as it brightens you fade away. Oh, I
should be loth to lose my treasure of past happiness and become once
more what I was then--a hermit in the depths of my own mind,
sometimes yawning over drowsy volumes and anon a scribbler of wearier
trash than what I read; a man who had wandered out of the real world
and got into its shadow, where his troubles, joys and vicissitudes
were of such slight stuff that he hardly knew whether he lived or only
dreamed of living. Thank